lark's poem.

THE DISAPPOINTED TENDERFOOT

HE reached the West in a palace car where the writers tell us the
cowboys are,
With the redskin bold and the centipede and the rattlesnake and the
loco weed.
He looked around for the Buckskin Joes and the things he'd seen in
the Wild West shows--
The cowgirls gay and the bronchos wild and the painted face of the
Injun child.
He listened close for the fierce war-whoop, and his pent-up spirits
began to droop,
And he wondered then if the hills and nooks held none of the sights
of the story books.

He'd hoped he would see the marshal pot some bold bad man with a
pistol shot,
And entered a low saloon by chance, where the tenderfoot is supposed
to dance
While the cowboy shoots at his bootheels there and the smoke of powder
begrims the air,
But all was quiet as if he'd strayed to that silent spot where the
dead are laid.
Not even a faro game was seen, and none flaunted the long, long green.
'Twas a blow for him who had come in quest of a touch of the real
wild woolly West.

He vainly sought for a bad cayuse and the swirl and swish of the
flying noose,
And the cowboy's yell as he roped a steer, but nothing of this fell
on his ear.
Not even a wide-brimmed hat he spied, but derbies flourished on every
side,
And the spurs and the "chaps" and the flannel shirts, the high-heeled
boots and the guns and the quirts,
The cowboy saddles and silver bits and fancy bridles and swell outfits
He'd read about in the novels grim, were not on hand for the likes of
him.

He peered about for a stagecoach old, and a miner-man with a bag of
gold,
And a burro train with its pack-loads which he'd read they tie with
the diamond hitch.
The rattler's whir and the coyote's wail ne'er sounded out as he hit
the trail;
And no one knew of a branding bee or a steer roundup that he longed to
see.
But the oldest settler named Six-Gun Sim rolled a cigarette and
remarked to him:
"The West hez gone to the East, my son, and it's only in tents sich
things is done."
_E. A. Brinninstool._

A COWBOY ALONE WITH HIS CONSCIENCE

WHEN I ride into the mountains on my little broncho bird,
Whar my